The people who would like to limit the public's ability to watch its government are at it again, this time in the guise of state employee unions which want to limit access to the records of public employees. A court of appeals panel suggested last week that the state Supreme Court have a look at the case. There is a point of law involved, true, but the answer is easy: No.

The unions assert that the state shouldn't release the names of state workers because their contract says so. Our Open Records Law, one of the hallmarks of Wisconsin's government, says the opposite.

It allows citizens to demand a wide variety of information including the names and salaries of public employees. Two newspapers asked for names, were refused, and that's what the lawsuit is about. Releasing names, the unions say, could endanger state employees.

This tidbit was negotiated into contracts under former Gov. Scott McCallum, and the legal question is whether the Legislature effectively changed the Open Records Law when it approved the contracts, even though it didn't pass any accompanying legislation which specifically changed the records law.

That would make it a sort of implied change. The next implication is that any change by contract could change any law except for the state constitution. Workers and citizens could lose fundamental rights and protections based solely on negotiations. That's twaddle.

Moreover, no one has offered any evidence that any state employees were harmed by release of their names. This is another case in which nebulous fear is used as an excuse to restrict public access to information. Nor were the two newspapers asking for such intimate information as Social Security numbers. All they wanted were names.

Consider who is really harmed by the withholding of such information. Without knowing the names of public employees, there is no way for the public to know whose political buddies have been hired or whose relatives received a big raise.

There is no way of knowing that the person hired by one state department was let go by another state because of misconduct or criminal activity. Discovering problems like these becomes impossible without knowing names, and if state contracts can alter the law in this way, then local governments could presumably adopt the same practice so long as they conform to the altered state law. Bluntly put, citizens wouldn't be permitted to find out who works for a school district, a city, a village, a town, or a county.

The Supreme Court should take this case and quickly set the matter straight. If it does not, or even if it does, it would make sense to enshrine the open records provision in the state constitution - and the Open Meetings Law, too, while we're at it. In 1998 Wisconsin voted to put the right to keep arms in the state constitution. Surely we should do the same for these more useful and equally fundamental rights.